Joanne Bland, veteran of the Selma Voting Rights Campaign, tells us we're all pieces of the puzzle and we have to figure out where our piece fits

Though I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, and though I participated in civil rights demonstrations by the age of eight, I hadn't the slightest idea what conditions Black people in the ‎South had to endure. Life was almost unimaginable to those who did not personally experience it.

I was struck by what I heard this morning when we visited Bethel Baptist Church, in Birmingham, AL. Rev. Wilder said that before the civil rights struggle "African Americans had all of the burdens of citizenship but none of the benefits." Blacks had no access to libraries, good education, basic medical care, recreation facilities...equal opportunities of all kinds were denied. Things had to change, but Rev. Richard Bryant told us on Wednesday that, "you really were jeopardizing your welfare and your life to even participate in the civil rights movement.”

The Black Church was the cornerstone of the Black community and ministers were leaders in Black communities. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X‎, John Lewis, Roy Wilkins and others influenced me growing up. They were all very young men who led the movement. They were courageous, resilient, determined, we'll organized and willing to make unbelievable sacrifices. The men, women and children of the Civil rights Movement were true heroes.

As we embark on 2017, this country's dark history is looming over us again. How do we effectively disrupt the racism, homophobia, and misogyny which have been given renewed energy by our recent election? I am dismayed by the feelings of conflict and distrust between civil Rights pioneers and the leadership of modern day movements like Black Lives Matter. Our pioneers see a lack of discipline and know how in young leaders of today. Leaders of today's movements have said that "older people need to step aside and let them get the job done". One need only read the principles pf the Black Lives Matter Movement to know that the leaders are women who are smart, aware and serious about the task at hand. They are equipped with tools that churches and leaders of the past couldn’t imagine! They can send messages and calls to rally thousands with the press of a computer key.

Joanne Bland, who we met in Selma, AL., told us that we're all pieces of the puzzle in the struggle for civil rights, and we need to figure out where our piece fits. Pieces of the puzzle...there is room in the struggle for all...remember Sankofa.

For our White warriors...keep in mind that the white Freedom Fighters didn't think of themselves as "allies"...they were fighters on the front lines!

Even after crossing the bridge on Bloody Sunday, marchers had to walk 300 yards before encountering police on horseback.

The Living Legacy Pilgrimage exemplifies the difference between reading and experiencing.

We can read that Civil Rights activists marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, (Bloody Sunday) and were beaten and tear-gassed by state troopers and county militia on the other side, but that’s different than walking the bridge in silence today and trying to imagine what the marchers were thinking, not knowing what awaited them on the other side.

We can read that many African Americans were beaten because of the color of their skin, but that’s different than hearing a Black woman relate how her church-going parents were severely beaten and survived only because of their resiliency.

We can read that White supremacy dictated that a Black man never, ever look a White woman in the face, but that’s different than hearing an aging Black activist describe that crime as “eye-ball rape.”

We can read and know that racism continues today, but that’s different than seeing vandalism and bullet holes in the gravestones of Civil Rights martyrs James Chaney (murdered 1964) and Jimmie Lee Jackson (murdered 1965).

We can read all we want, but reading is so different than learning first-hand from people who experienced violence in the 1960s—and who remind us that, yes, racism does continue today.​-- by Robert Weir

Della Maynor tells her story of the night Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered

Sometimes history comes unbidden to your doorstep. Such was the case on February 17, 1965, when it came calling to Marion, Alabama, the county seat of Perry County. As we have found throughout our journey, a church (Zion United Methodist) located across the street from the County Courthouse served as the organizing center for voter rights. During a meeting that night, hundreds of local citizens were rounded up and “packed together like sardines” in the county jail, we were told by James Oakes, one of the participants. “We were treated like criminals for wanting the right to have a voice in our government.” Added the Rev. Richard Bryant, “My parents [who were among those jailed] were courageous to believe that there could be change.”

Delia Maynor, a high-school student in 1965 who also addressed us, was among those detained and moved to the state penitentiary in Selma. But she, along with the others, reminded us that their sacrifice was nothing compared to what happened to 26-year old Jimmy Lee Jackson. During the melee on the town square, he ran to Mack’s Café to check on his mother and grandfather. In his attempts to protect them, he was shot by a trooper and died eight days later. The death of this innocent local man galvanized the community and the SCLC, leading them to hatch a bold idea: a 50-mile march from nearby Selma to the state capital to demand their right to vote.

Today, one of the most riveting and compelling video recordings from the Civil Rights Movement is when the organizers’ attempt to make this march was violently rebuffed by armed local and state authorities after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Marion--known as the “Birthplace of the 50 Mile March from Selma to Montgomery”-- remains a community of resilient people, both humbled and proud of the role they played in this important milestone in the Movement. We are most grateful to the gracious members of Zion United Methodist for helping enlighten us.

We met Mrs. Ethel Ree Waite at the Zion United Methodist Church in Marion, Alabama. It was early in the morning and sunny when our Living Legacy Pilgrimage group came to meet the church folks and hear Mrs. Waite perform an Elegy for Jimmy Lee Jackson, who was shot in Marion by state troopers, during the struggle for voting rights in 1965.

Mrs. Waite is big and beautiful, with a smooth open face and regal bearing. Her head is wrapped in an olive green turban that matches her graceful tunic, and gold hoops shine on her ears.

“They shot him in the belly,“ she begins forcefully. “I miss your kind face already… I cry for you… I mourn for you,” Mrs. Waite sings in her rich full voice.

This was “Lucy Foster’s Elegy” for Jimmie Lee Jackson from the play Jimmy Lee, by Dr. Billie Jean Young. So who was Lucy who loved Jimmie so well? Later I find out she was a “fiery” activist leader in Marion in the 1960s. Jimmy Lee had come home from Indiana and was working with the Movement. That night he had brought his eighty-year old grandfather to the march in support of James Orange, an activist who was being held in the jail in Marion. When his grandfather was attacked by state troopers, Jimmy Lee tried to protect him. For that, state troopers shot him in the stomach. Then they beat him with billy clubs. He died six days later at the age of twenty-six.

When Mrs. Waite finished her song, she announces, “So we said, ‘Let’s take Jimmy Lee’s body to Montgomery and give it to George Wallace!” And that was what started the idea of the march to Montgomery.

After other speakers, Mrs. Waite comes up to speak again. She is a powerful presence. She speaks about the need for people to work together now to preserve this country. We have to talk with each other, and she gives an example. Before the election, she called a white friend to urge her to vote for Hillary. The friend was impressed by Trumps’ aim to take America back. “Back?” Mrs. Waite asked, “Back to what we had before? Back two hundred years?”

After the program, we were waiting to speak with her, when a young woman came up and called her, “Mama.” I asked if she were Mrs. Waite’s daughter and she explained that Mrs. Waite was the mother of the whole church. I see why. She exudes love, calm assurance, and strength. What gives her that serenity? Some of the reason must be her unshakable faith in God. But maybe it’s also that telling your story, when you have suffered and struggled to do the right thing, is healing. When you finally get recognized for what you went through and what you accomplished, bitterness can melt away.

When she hugs me, I feel what a powerful force of goodness and love she is. She says she won’t give up and that we won’t either. She knows that and I believe her. She says that people can change. “Look how Saul changed into Paul,” she reminds us. I can feel her warmth and strength flow into me.

Lunch counter protest exhibit at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis

Heading from Memphis, TN, to Jackson, MS, we read stories and watched videos of well-known heroes and examples of great resilient people – Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Andy, Goodman, Jim Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner are just a handful. Their resiliency is remarkable to me.

In contrast, in the summer of 1964, I was living in central Michigan, taking a few classes toward a MA in education and mostly oblivious to what was going on in the South. I was also preparing for my wedding in August.

Sometime today, I read about someone who was the first to integrate a southern zoo. This hit closer to home. I have always loved to visit the soon. The Detroit Zoo was a special trip when I was child. Then when I had my two daughters, trips to the Saginaw (MI) Zoo and then Maymont Park in Richmond, VA., were favorites. It had never dawned on me that zoos would be places that black families did not get to enjoy.

This started me thinking about the resiliency of black parents, who were not able to share so many forms of entertainment with their children. No weekly trips to the library, no Cokes for a shopping break at the local lunch counter, no swimming at the public pool on a hot summer day, or trips to the beach, unless there was a black beach.

It wasn’t just the well-known heroes who were resilient, ordinary moms and dads were being resilient every day. Knowing their children were not able to enjoy these treats must have hurt them deeply.​-- by Marcia Slosser

James Chaney's daughter, Angela Lewis, tells of the father she never knew because his life was taken from her in the fight for civil rights

The Mississippi Delta is full of dirt roads laid out straight as rulers across its flat landscape and disappearing into nowhere.

“I'm very thankful today for dirt roads," Civil Rights Movement veteran Hollis Watkins said with a chuckle. The dust a car kicks up acting as a shield that helped keep him safe when making an escape.

Today we entered into story, hearing the kind of details you get so powerfully when someone shares their history in conversation:Evelyn Cole Calloway describing how her father, despite having a broken jaw and ribs, a ruptured spleen, and damage to his spine from a beating by the Klan, refused her mother's pleas to see a doctor because he couldn't be sure the doctor wasn't part of the Klan.

And James Chaney's daughter, Angela Lewis, making him come alive by telling us about the song he would sing to warn his siblings their mother was almost home and they needed to straighten up the house, and how he became so passionate about the Civil Rights Movement that he would spend nights at the community center.

Stories we won't forget and can pass along to help keep the legacy alive.

Jewel Rush-McDonald tells of her parents' beating by the Ku Klux Klan after a Finance meeting at the church

Mrs. Emily Cole Calloway's parents also attended the Finance meeting and were confronted by the Klan upon leaving the church

Today, at the Mt. Zion Methodist Church northeast of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, I was overwhelmed by the resilience of Jewel Rush-McDonald and Emily Cole Calloway. The parents of each of these remarkable women had been victims of Klan violence at that church in June 1964. The Klan had been searching for participants in the Freedom Summer of 1964, and specifically for white participants, whom they regarded as “outside agitators” and “communists.” Convinced that the congregants of the Mt. Zion Church would have knowledge of their whereabouts, Klan members invaded a finance meeting that was occurring at the church on Tuesday, June 16. They severely beat meeting attendees, including Ms. Cole’s father, Fred Cole, who received a broken jaw, broken ribs, and permanent damage to the nerves of one his legs. Ms. Rush-McDonald’s parents were also brutally beaten. Angered that the beatings had produced no useful information, the Klan then torched the wooden church, which was totally destroyed. (On June 20, James Chaney (who was black) and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (who were white), visited and investigated the ruins of the church. The next day, with the collusion of the sheriff’s office, the three were brutally murdered and buried by the Klan.

Ms. Cole related that some years later, her father, Fred, had said that he had already forgiven his assailants, but would never forget. Ms. Rush-McDonald’s parents were equally resilient—her mother went to work the day after the attack! Their courage is an inspiration to all of us.

I am the younger brother of James Earl Chaney. I was a young teen when he was taken from us, brutally killed, disfigured, for the crime of helping in the movement. Earl was going to teach me how to drive that night after he came home from the meetings......but, he never came back.

We waited on the porch, Momma, my sisters and I... but no sign of him that night,... the following days and weeks. When the three bodies were found, our lives were irrevocably changed. So many hard cold realities; where to find a proper resting place in segregated, Jim Crow Mississippi?

I somehow lived through the funeral with all the news people, crowds of onlookers, hatred from all our white folks and the complicit silence of our community...that silence lasted decades. Though we tried to re-order our lives, we never could find rest until we found closure.

Momma so desperately needed that justice to come, along with the families of the other victims. That closure came at a cost; hours and years of community meetings, numerous attempts to bring to justice those who were responsible. Forty years passed. One day much, much too late, the manslaughter charge finally stuck. That day brought release and relief.

I had become an uncle early on, before James was killed. My niece, (James' daughter, Angela), has been a joy in my life. Many was the time I'd call her to offer support & a comforting sounding board. As the years passed, the support and love goes both ways. I have tried to pick up the pieces in my life.

My brother's legacy exacted a price. Through struggles and joys, my life goes on. How many times I wonder what life would have been like if James had not been in harm’s way. He did it because he believed it was the right thing to do. He did it so we could have opportunities he could not possibly have dreamed of back then.​-- by Bonnie Bell

The ruins of Bryant's Grocery, Money, MS, where Emmet Till was said to have whistled at a white woman, a crime that led to his death

As much as we pray and strive for the best, resiliency persists in the struggle of good versus evil.

Today, on the Living Legacy Pilgrimage, our group visited the grave and memorial of Fannie Lou Hamer. The daughter of a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta, she attempted to vote at age 45 in 1962; for this, she and her family were deposed from their home and she was jailed and beaten. Two years later, this resilient woman spoke on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for the right of African Americans to participate at the Democratic National Convention.

In 1955, when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, flirted with a white Mississippi woman, he was brutalized and murdered. With resilience, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted that her son’s casket lid be open at his funeral; his shot and mutilated face and cleaved skull were viewed by 10,000 people.

In the 1960s, segregationists wanted Negroes to be shipped back to Africa. In post-election 2016, President-elect Donald Trump says he intends to ban Muslims and Mexicans from America.

Reggie Harris addresses the pilgrims in Medgar Evers carport, the site of Evers's assasination

Marker at the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial in Ruleville, MS

Working in many different types of schools w/ many different kids, I have always marveled @ the resilience of kids in awful circumstances to simply carry on. And some do it w/ real grace & panache. Even humor! It is a mystery how they do it!

Today we had examples of people who dedicated their lives to a struggle that was indeed life threatening. But courage is also contagious. And it is sustained by a powerful spiritual community. Fannie Lou had a mother who apparently modeled strong, principled behavior. And she learned it well. Fearlessness is a necessary precondition in Nonviolent Direct Action, and although their roles were a little different, she & Medgar Evers were nonetheless both lightning rods. When Fannie Lou was not allowed to vote she figured out how to work around the rules & when she was savagely beaten she went public with her story.

She did not quit. It was not an option. Her capacity to come back was only exceeded by her fierce sense of righteousness. It was time to STAND UP & TALK BACK. And she showed us how. This is a lesson we all need to learn & relearn! Resilience, after all, is the willingness to get back up, to be strong in the face of daunting odds. Today we face our own daunting odds. May we emulate her strength & courage as we go forward, refusing to be a party to today's political ugliness!

Thomas Milam and Dr. Marie Milam tell the history of Centenary United Methodist Church and relate their own experiences in the Jim Crow South

Our focus invites us to recognize that no how bad life gets, human beings have a tremendous capacity for resiliency. This capacity reveals itself in individuals and communities. At the individual level, it might look like this – a young black woman chooses to enroll in Memphis State University instead of the local black college. Once there, this woman, Marie, learns that swimming is a required subject and that she is not permitted in the pool. She is told to take a form to the Dean of Women to collect a signature that will exempt her for the swimming requirement. Does the young woman cry? Scream in frustration? Get angry about this Catch 22? No, she signs the Dean’s signature herself and turns in the form.​-- by Mary Alm

​What do we know of African Americans in the armed forces of the United States? We know they were not allowed to serve in integrated units in 1948. We know they took the same oath to uphold the US Constitution that white folks took. We know that Constitution originally defined them as three/firths a human being. And yet, on Sunday, November 13, 2016, Centenary United Methodist Church – a black United Methodist Congregation in Memphis, TN, began their service with a Veteran’s Day Celebration. That one congregation honored – one by one – over 80 members (past and present) who were serving or had served in every branch of our armed forces. They served a nation that still treats their lives as less valuable than white lives and do so with pride. ​-- by Mary Alm

It is Sunday, Nov. 13, in Memphis, shortly after the election of Donald Trump. What progress will be destroyed and what can I do? In the course of the day I learned a lot about what Black Americans faced and how they endured and overcame. We attended the Centenary United Methodist Church, founded in in 1865, burned down in 1866 and rebuilt and expanded over the years. Reverend Deborah Smith said of the election, “Raise up your head, the Lord is near. We have nothing to fear from the wolf. The Lord has your back.” I began to fathom the role of Church in affirming dignity, sanctity and hope.

The National Museum of Civil Rights at the Lorraine Motel brought home the degradation of slavery, the total oppression of Negroes, and the courage and resilience of people who endured humiliation daily and risked everything if they defied the code or stood up for their rights. The museum also brought home the unending struggle for justice, not just by a few famous iconic warriors in a few cities, but by young and old across the South. Each person risked all and payed a price. But there seemed to be faith that however long the road to justice, each person’s sacrifice would move the promised land, and a time of justice, closer. I realized that resilience is not a personal trait alone, but rests on family, community and faith.

The civil rights movement came after centuries of Black resistance and rebellion, personal and collective. Lessons learned along the way helped the civil rights movement to devise strategies that worked. Winning rights in law was only the beginning of the struggle to use them. So I am reminded that we get what we fight for, and can take no gains for granted. If the next Administration attempts to undermine civil rights on many fronts, a new struggle for justice will be needed. I have found role models for dignity and valor this week.​-- by Ray Bridge

On Sunday, November 13, 2016, a group of thirty-two people from around the US boarded a bus in Memphis, Tennessee, for a week-long pilgrimage through Mississippi and Alabama to learn about the Southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950 and 60s. In these challenging times, these pilgrims are learning stories of resistance and resilience. They will be returning home with new understanding of how they might restore and retain hope in the struggle for justice. Each day we’ll be posting new stories of resilience from their journey. We hope you’ll follow along.

Here's one to get started.

Sunday, November 13, 2016 -- Memphis, TennesseeToday I met a young African American man I will call Sam. Sam works two jobs to care for his wife and two children. For of those jobs, he works at a hotel as a van driver, bellman, and whatever else the guests need him to do. As he wheeled a luggage cart filled with my bags and boxes, he asked me why I was in town. When I told him I was here as part of the staff of the Living Legacy Pilgrimage to visit civil rights sites in Memphis and in Mississippi and Alabama, he looked directly at me and after a short pause, he said, "Nobody who comes here ever asks me to take them to the civil rights museum. They want to go to Graceland, or maybe to Beale Street, but they never ask to go to the civil rights museum."

​He shook his head as if he'd just learned that I'd arrived from another planet, then reached over to me, extended his arms, and hugged me. He never said, "white people never ask me." He just said, "people." But the unspoken connotation was clear.He told me that he had met another guy from our group. “That guy,” he said, “had been in Selma.”

“Yes,” I said, “that was Rev. Jim Hobart.” He even spent time in jail.

He then told me that his mother, who died when he was only 22 years old, saw to it that he went to Catholic school. “That taught me,” he said,” to get along with lots of different kinds of people. And it allowed me to get into college. My mother taught me not to have children until I was married and until I could care for them. I have two children now and I’m so grateful to her for telling me to wait.”

“One stupid mistake,” he said, “and I could have ended up like lots of the people I grew up with. I was able to stay out of trouble. One stupid mistake. I miss my mom so much.”

I told Sam what an excellent role model he is to his children and to other young people. I told him more about the Pilgrimage and encouraged him to look it up online. I also told him to remember that they are good white people out there who are trying to make a difference. He said, “I know that,” and he thanked me again with second hug.